REYNOLDSBURG, Ohio – The old argument against negotiating with terrorists is simple and indisputable: When you reward their filthy behavior by meeting their demands, you can count on that behavior repeating itself.

The same principle should be applied to teacher strikes in public school districts.

News broke Thursday morning that a tentative agreement has been reached in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, which probably signals the end of a teacher strike in the city’s school district.

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The vast majority of Reynoldsburg teachers abandoned their students 15 days ago, due to their union’s inability to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with the school board.

Some would argue that students have an absolute right to a daily education, with no threat of interruption due to adult financial and political disputes.

One might expect public school teachers, who spend hours helping children learn every weekday, would be the first to endorse that concept.

But that wasn’t the case in Reynoldsburg. The teachers put their salary demands, benefit desires and class size complaints before the interests of their students. They left the children in the care of unprepared replacement teachers so they could prevail at the bargaining table – and it appears they are going to prevail.

While details of the proposed settlement have not been released, Kim Cooper, co-president of the Reynoldsburg teachers union, told the Columbus Dispatch that the new contract will take a “significant step forward” in addressing the issue of class sizes.

That almost certainly means that the school board, under heavy pressure from the public and the courts, caved in to a union demand to hire more teachers. And we can be pretty sure that a nice raise and benefit enhancement is also part of the tentative deal.

During the strike, the district informed community members that union demands were too expensive – about $2.5 million more than the district budget could handle.

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No matter. The union apparently got its way, with widespread support of naïve parents and students who simply wanted the strike to be over, regardless of the impact on school finances.

All of this means other teacher unions, throughout Ohio and elsewhere, have yet another example of how it pays to abandon students. That will encourage more teacher strikes, and more students going days, weeks and sometimes months with their right to a public education sacrificed at the altar of collective bargaining.

Even worse is that fact that teacher union labor disputes are rarely settled for very long. Union collective bargaining is a perpetual game. Negotiated union contracts are only valid for a period of time – usually between two and five years – and then a new labor “crisis” almost always appears with the start of fresh negotiations.

It’s a prescheduled game of cat-and-mouse, with the education of children hanging in the balance every few years. How can parents and caring citizens tolerate such a situation?

The unfairness to honest, dedicated school board members is depressing.

These are people who spend their time selflessly serving their schools and communities. They try to watch the budget and protect the interests of taxpayers against the constantly increasing demands of employee unions. They try to implement reforms that will hold teachers more accountable for providing quality instruction to students.

But when a teacher strike is rumored, or teachers actually walk out, school boards become public enemy No. 1.

That’s because the teachers have all the public relations advantages. They work with children 180 days per year, every year. They develop personal relationships with the kids and their families. They earn the affection and respect of their communities.

They also use their classrooms as bully pulpits to convince students that their labor complaints are legitimate. The students dutifully relay that message to their parents.

When those teachers go on strike, they can count on those personal relationships with families to pay big dividends. Those families do the unions’ bidding by pressuring school boards to give the teachers what they want, regardless of the cost.

Without public support, school boards are virtually powerless to defend sensible polices, because they, unlike the unions, are accountable to the public.

Teacher strikes also trash the concept of representative local government.

In theory, citizens elect school board members to govern local school districts, just like they elect legislators to govern their states and congressmen to govern the nation. That means school board members are supposedly responsible for making the major decisions that affect a district.

But how much control do these rightfully elected officials really have?

A good example is the Portland, Oregon school district, which reported having a $20 million budget surplus in early 2014. That was bad timing, because the teacher contract was expiring, and the union insisted that the surplus be used to hire more teachers and lighten the workload of current instructors.

The school board argued that the surplus equaled about 10 percent of the district budget, which is generally the amount that accountants say should be set aside in reserve. But the teachers voted to go on strike, and were three days away from a walkout, when a tentative contract was suddenly negotiated.

Of course the new agreement included a provision mandating the hiring of 150 new teachers, costing an estimated $11.3 million per year. It also included across-the-board teacher raises for three years, costing the district about $26 million.

So much for the budget surplus.

People can legitimately disagree about whether the money should have been saved or spent. But the fact is that the school board, which is elected to make those types of decisions, was not allowed to do its job.

The decision was made by the teachers union, which was not elected by voters and is not accountable to the public. That’s not how representative government is supposed to work.

Officials have addressed this type of recurring nightmare in Wisconsin. Act 10, a state law enacted in 2011, severely curtails teacher union collective bargaining power. The unions are only allowed to negotiate over salaries, and can only seek raises that equal the most recent cost-of-living increase.

As a result, school boards and administrators are free to do what they were hired to do – govern their districts as they see fit, with voters sitting in judgment. Unions no longer have the leverage to interfere with the governing process. More importantly, they lack the ability to abandon their students when school boards don’t cave into their demands.

State governments everywhere should follow the courageous and wise example set by Wisconsin lawmakers, if they really believe that schools exist, first and foremost, for the benefit of children.